"I'm excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort. The MacOSX porting history is basically as old as OpenOffice.org itself. Practically from the start there was the plan to have a native version for Mac, however as a first step the community decided to produce an X11 port which - since OOo already had several X11 ports from the start - seemed to be a good way to get a version quickly as temporary solution. As usual the 'temporary solution' tended to be quite long lived."

The comments on TFA are a mix of pleas either to cooperate with the NeoOffice developers or to replace that craptastic NeoOffice junk or to use Cocoa instead of Carbon. While the author has made some comments, he's avoided these questions. I wonder why Sun is so cool on the idea of supporting NeoOffice, given that their approach to supporting MacOSX is to use... Java.

It will be interested to watch the competitive landscape for office suites on the Mac going forward. Apple iWork, Microsoft Office for Mac, OpenOffice on both X11 and Carbon, NeoOffice, and KOffice will all vie for a slice of a growing client platform.

Although I salute Sun for deciding to help port OpenOffice to the mac, perhaps it would be better to help an existing project accomplish this goal, such as NeoOffice, instead of starting from scratch. It would certainly speed up development time for both parties involved.

Although I salute Sun for deciding to help port OpenOffice to the mac, perhaps it would be better to help an existing project accomplish this goal, such as NeoOffice, instead of starting from scratch. It would certainly speed up development time for both parties involved.

The biggest problem is the license. OpenOffice uses the LGPL, NeoOffice the GPL, so NeoOffice can take code from OpenOffice, but not the other way round. (Unless OpenOffice changes its license from LGPL to GPL, and they won't do that because it would prevent Sun, IBM and others from linking proprietary code into their OpenOffice derivates without licensing this proprietary code under GPL, too.)

Sun is one of my favourite companies but why does Sun bother with OpenOffice for Mac. Java, Netbeans, OpenOffice in general all contribute towards making Solaris an attractive platform. OpenOffice for Mac doesn't.

Apple have a lot to gain from a native port and yet they don't contribute. So Sun does it for them and in doing so dilutes it resources on efforts that don't benefit them.

2) Apple will use ZFS and Dtrace in Leopard, perhaps there will be a deal between Apple and Sun in the futur."

More than one analyst suggests a Apple-Sun merge: Solaris as kernel for a Mac OS X with Java Desktop/Enterprise System's technologies, powered with Sun's solutions native in Cocoa.
Yeah, Solaris hasn't today some APIs from Mach that OSX needs, but NetBSD code can be a good help about this. It isn't impossible.

Perhaps because Sun want to use some Mac as corporate desktop so they need their tools on it.

Or something even more simple - get their operating system running on all the main operating systems (Windows, Solaris, Linux and MacOS X) and use it as a selling point to businesses.

Use the operating system that suites the end users and standardise on tarOffice - with the rising number of Macs, Linux and OpenSolaris deployments - its the perfect time for Sun to cash in and grow their software side of the business.

Potentially to aid in the adoption levels of OpenOffice. If OpenOffice for Mac runs completely natively, adoption of OpenOffice will likely increase.
Greater adoption means more OpenOffice documents out there.
More OpenOffice documents out there will help increase public perception of OpenOffice as a "legitimate" platform.
Lather-Rinse-Repeat all the while OpenOffice grows even bigger and as a result StartOffice follows.

All in all quite in the interest of Sun (and everybody else) as I see it.

"Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port." http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/05/sun_embraces_op.html

This is most amazing news! Seriously. I've seen documents that can't be reliably opened in Microsoft's Office 2004 yet they open perfectly in OOo. However X11 is incredibly ugly and not only in the looks but also in how it really breaks the entire workflow on a Mac.
Why Sun though?

This is really good news if they are helping doing a Native write of OpenOffice.

NeoOffice isn't too bad, but it's a bit sluggish at times and has a few little quirks.

If they push OpenOffice as Native, it's certainly going to make MS a little nervous, because if they push it out before their next Office for the Mac (Which at this rate, will never come out) OS X is going to have a full fledged Office Package.

I love Keynote and Pages, but things like Excel and Database work are missing, and to have OpenOffice run natively and with a decent speed, will be a godsend.

This will be the end of Microsoft Office as the premier Windows/Mac compatible offce suite. Now there will be OpenOffice.org which will run natively on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows and Mac OS X and all multi-platorm software written for it (macros, addins) will be compatible, maybe after a recompile.

You can target any OS on any hardware in a way that wasn't possible before, from simple desktops to huge servers and mainframes and be assured your software will run on it.

This is like saying "This is the end of the Roman Empire with Caesar in power now". Come on, give me a break. OpenOffice is crap, it will remain crap. All the OSX users get now is a resource hog bloat that has a fraction of the usability. I had been using OpenOffice for a long time and just finally said to hell with it. It is slow morass and worthless. Nice if you need to type up a sentence, but anything more forget it.

I don't think so but then I'm a Linux user. OpenOffice.org runs fine on Windows, Linux and Solaris so it must be possible to make it run on Mac OS X as well with reasonable performance.

It's easy to say

OpenOffice.org is crap and will remain crap

when I could say just as well that Mac OS X's performance overall is crap. Nice GUI but slow as molasses.

My reference for performance is Slackware Linux and Mac OS X doesn't even come close in reliability, stability and speed. OpenOffice.org runs fine as well.

And Apple's X implementation is really bad. So instead of defending your precious vendor through all of its faults you'd better start demanding a decent X server and kernel implementation. Or better yet adopt the Solaris kernel.

Then we can talk about OpenOffice.org performance problems on Mac OS X. I would have preferred a real native implementation in C/C++/ObjC for performance reasons but it doesn't look that way from what I have read.

I don't know how Apple have managed to get to this low-point performance-wise but it's a huge accomplishment in and of itself. Now Microsoft have managed to do the same with Vista. Instead of one incompetent company we now have two.

GNU/Linux, BSD and Solaris are nowadays way faster than any of the big two "consumer-friendly" commercial operating systems. Please tell where it all went wrong.

One of my gripes has been trying to advocate OO to Mac users yet setting it up on OSX can be a PITA.

Having a native version will help my work place a hell of a lot as I find in Printing OO is much more reliable for document creation than MS Office. We had a client doing property valuation report for a large university with many locations and MS Office was a nightmare to work with.

We scratch their earlier efforts and got them onto OO and it was a much easier effort especially when you are talking hundreds of pages with images included. Words file handling couldn't deal with all the data we were using and we couldn't tell the client to just go and get InDesign for the one job.

They intially were using Mac Notebooks but went and hired a Windows Notebook that I cleaned up and installed OO on. They never looked back. If OO was a native Mac app then they could have kept using their Mac Notebooks but then again, with the images having audio bites to help Id each image, OS-X just didn't work as easy as XP. Look at image, play corresponding audio clip, search doc for relevant page, drag and drop image into doc at relevant page, repeat.

That's too bad. I, for one, would like to see an Apple and Sun merger, or maybe Apple just buying Sun outright. Both firms have a lot of interesting technology that could go well together. Mac OS X running on a Solaris Kernel would just be wonderful.

While a merger is unlikely, cooperation between them seems likely. And some sort of technology exchange or licensing deal probably already exists.

Sun has plenty of technical expertise and in house technology. DTrace and ZFS are good examples of kernel level stuff. And there is probably all sorts of mid-range server technology that Apple could use.

A native Openoffice port will benefit both of them. Apple because it would slightly lessen their reliance on the "good" nature of MS. Sun because it wants OO and ODF to break into the office productivity market still dominated by Word and Excel.

However as I understood it, the alpha release was only 10 bugzilla entries away from a release. Hopefully expertise from Sun will finally drag it over the line.